The One
by RowanDarkstar
Summary: He knew as he stood in the rush of pleasure that blistering morn, that she would be his."


**Disclaimer:** This all belongs to Renaissance Pictures and Universal. I wish I could say it was all mine. Truly I do. But I'm just borrowing this wonderful world with all due respect.  
**Spoilers: **Through mid-season 6

**THE ONE **

by Lady Rowan Copyright (c) 2009

The first time he stood close to her, he lost focus on the battle. For the god of war...this was unforgivable.

To feel something new, to discover dimensions he had not before touched upon... For a god, this was unheard of.

Ares stood behind the woman warrior one sun soaked morning, and he felt the vibrations quivering like rising storm winds. Never had he felt such energy emanating from a single human body. Her muscles trembled and pulsed with the violence, the need, and sparks lifted the fine hairs on the god's arms. The warrior woman's shoulders lay bare, bronzed by hours of battle on Grecian ground. Strong thighs caught glimpses of freedom between the panels of her skirt. In her path, the very air shook. She stood atop a rise in the clearing, breath heavy, sword strong in her hand and hair wild in the breeze. She was surveying the field, listening beneath the surface sounds of shifting armor, beneath desperate moans from the dying bodies at her feet. She was listening for sounds of deliberate movement, of vibrance, of attack. She had to know if the battle was over. Something in him thought she didn't really want it to be; that the fire of his war god's blood ran through her mortal flesh.

He saw the crimson waves wafting off of her; the anger, the passion, the lust. He knew as he stood in the rush of pleasure that blistering morn, that she would be his. She was his chosen. She was...the one.

He moved his hands through the air of her aura, tasting the energy on his fingertips and sliding them over his tongue. He stood for long moments drinking in the sensation.

Until she cocked her head ever so slightly, and listened over her shoulder.

She whirled, steel blue scanning the horizon, the distant trees, the shadows of a rocky outcropping.

He thought there was someone behind him, some source of danger they had both missed. But his search came up as empty as hers. The knowledge settled like honey in the pit of his stomach: she felt him.

No mortal had ever felt his presence.

He didn't appear to her that day. The next time he hovered in her vicinity, determined to test his wild theory... she sensed him again. He knew it was real. She was the one.

She surprises him to this day.

They became partners in war. They became enemies in battle. They flirted, they touched. For a while, on a farm, they became a strange kind of friends. He knows he has been her curse for a while, and once he was her savior. He wants to be something in between.  
He isn't sure when she started looking at him differently, but he suspects it was somewhere between Eve and Livia, somewhere between Blondie's affectionate "our daughter" and her icier "yours". The fleeting glimpses of disgust in Gabrielle's eyes in the face of stories of Livia of Rome too closely echoed the quiet distance she placed between herself and the Xena of darker days.

He has long wondered when Xena would stop apologizing for her nature.

Ares loves his rebellious warrior, he's come to terms with this. There are sides to her he will never understand, but as he said to her one afternoon in the forest of the Amazons -- he wouldn't have her any other way.

He came to her that very night, after her battle with Varia, after Eve walked away from her mother to start a new life all alone. He came just to check. To check on... them? He hadn't been sure where they stood since he bit into an apple and she let him walk away. The balance had shifted, and they were feeling their way through a new world one more time. He waited until the Blonde One was asleep, then flashed into their makeshift campground and searched the clearing for Xena.  
He found her seated on a rock, armor gone and bare feet crossed at the ankles. Xena didn't look up when he arrived. He didn't know if she had had a falling out with Gabrielle, or if something else had scraped her armor, but she was in one of her rare soft moods that night.

He started to speak, but then he caught sight of her cheek in the moonlight and saw the traces of tears. Saline tracks bright against sun-dark skin.

His jaunty greeting died on his tongue.

Xena sniffed and turned a bit his direction. No eye contact, but it was an acknowledgement of his presence, a vague form of permission to approach.

He took a step nearer.

"Hey," was all he could think of to say.

Xena didn't reply; she looked down again and drew a deep breath, her worn cotton shift moving against full breasts.

He cleared his throat and pulled his focus to the point at hand. "Everything all right?"

When he thought she wasn't going to speak at all, she said softly, "Just a dream."

He took a beat to understand what she was saying. "Bad dream?" he asked, remembering his days at her grandmother's farm. Remembering his first real, mortal nightmare, and Xena's warm hands smoothing down the length of his back. She had offered comfort as she would have to her child, but without condescension. She had suffered nightmares of her own, and he had looked at her with different eyes that night, wished...maybe...he had been beside her one of those nights.

He had never realized how bad bad dreams could be.

Xena shook her head at his words. "No. Not bad. Just a hard one to wake up from."

He moved closer until he could almost feel the heat of her skin, but still did not touch. "How so?"

Her words were barely a whisper. "She just...it's been less than a year. Since she was a baby. Since she was curled up against me on my bedroll, suckling at my breast. My little girl."

It took him a moment to realize what had transpired. To understand this was the most real moment he and Xena had ever shared. To register how much of her heart she had offered.

He searched for words, but lost them to the shadows.

Xena drew a trembling breath, and Ares took the only action he saw. He swung a leg over the rock. First left, then right, then he slid down to sit behind her. He nestled her snuggly between his legs, thighs to thighs. Moving in hesitant increments, he wrapped his arms around her body and enclosed her in a sheltering embrace.

Xena's body remained stiff and guarded. But she didn't pull away. She didn't look up, she didn't lean back. But, she didn't pull away.

She lifted a hand to shield her face as twenty-five years of loss crashed down upon her in the shadows of a darkened grove. At last, she sank against his chest and he pressed his lips to her hair and felt more whole, more human than he had in all his life. For all the times he'd touched her...he had never iheld/i her.

They stayed on that rock a long time. And he couldn't believe she didn't hate him; for all he had done to Eve. To her.

In the end, she stood without a word and walked back to her camp. The next time they were together, there was a softness in her eyes. And things began to change.

He dropped in more often. He hiked alongside the warrior and battling bard down roads and across fields. He brought his black horse into step alongside Argo's girl. Xena grew less wary. She spoke more naturally in his presence, dropping the sarcasm and snark and carrying on genuine conversations with Gabrielle while he listened.

He threw a fireball one afternoon, scorching a warlord closing in on Gabrielle with a sword.

Minutes later, Xena kissed him. She walked away, with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. But she kissed him all the same.

He dropped in on Xena and company one afternoon on their way out of Potidaea.

When the group stopped for lunch, Gabrielle took the horses to the river's edge for a drink, and Xena looked around the glade with a sudden spark of wonder, jogged over to a nearby copse of trees. Ares followed her; this patch of forest looked like any other to him.

Xena ran her fingers tenderly over an aged poplar trunk. She looked up with a wistful smile as he approached. "Look. Joxer did this. When we were travelling together..." He stepped up beside her and squinted to make out a crudely carved 'J the M' in the black bark of the tree.

Ares smiled, started to make a wisecrack about the bumbling idiot, but the look in Xena's eyes stilled his tongue.

She drew a slow breath, exhaled as her fingers continued to trace the wind-worn letters. "Everybody's gone," she breathed, the words almost lost to the wind. She turned to him, with the most open gaze he had ever known, and said, "But you. You've never left. You've always...stayed." She swallowed hard, then whispered, "You're the only one."

And he finally understood. Understood she loses everyone. Understood she was watching Gabrielle every day, expecting the next scare to be the last. And after 25 hollow years, he finally knew how that loss would feel.

"All that time," she breathed, as though following his thoughts, "and you..."

Ares nodded, shrugged. "It was always you, Xena."

Gabrielle came back with a story about an otter, and they all had lunch.

Three weeks later, Ares stayed with the warrior and her bard around the campfire until they fell asleep. Then, just as he meant to zap back to Olympus, Xena's peaceful sleep turned to restless dreaming. She murmured indistinguishable words, her pale brow furrowed as she shifted in her bedroll. Ares stretched out on the chill ground beside her, faces inches apart, knees brushing. He lifted careful fingers and brushed the hair from her cheek, smoothed his hand down her bare shoulder. Xena whimpered softly, caught a breath. Then she moved closer, breathed the single word..."Ares..." and nestled into his shoulder.

He had no idea if she was conscious of the gesture, no idea if she would remember it in the morning. He stayed.

A week later, Xena kissed him again. This time, she didn't stop.

He still doesn't know where their relationship stands, nor where it's going. He knows what he's always known; he loves her. Now...he knows she loves him. He can't say she is his. Because he doesn't think Xena will ever belong to anyone. But he believes for the first time, that he is something she needs, and for a god...this is enough.

He stops some nights, to drink in the moment...when she is there, on the verge of orgasm beneath the power of his touch. And the same truculent energy he felt in the young warrior so long ago washes off her skin again. Only he is no longer a shadow gliding namelessly through her aura, but the cause of the rush. He is the dark energy mixing with her own. When she comes, she tangles her fingers in his hair. When she lets down, her skin is salty and warm and welcomes him to her.

He knows one thing. Time throughout, mortal and divine, she is...the one.

*****


End file.
